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Brain Pain Change

Cotton balls in my head. A loose affiliation of words lay between the cracks in my brain. I have trouble prying them out. I have trouble doing anything. It’s difficult enough to lift my hand to scratch my nose, or do something so complicated as to walk across the room. Even more, to actually go into the dark, the unexplored ruin of my thoughts, and feel around for words, sentences, the pleasing rhythm of a coherent thought.

I went through a season where everything I touched shocked me. It could have been the shoes I chose to wear, or even a lame super power that never fully surfaced. But I began to dread touching all things. I would reach for a door handle, and stop in fear, hovering centimeters above it, preparing myself for the zzt. The same is true now. There are days when I don’t want to be around people, don’t want to sit down to write, don’t want to face the pain of inability. The zzt of failure to communicate.

When you’re going through puberty, your nipples hurt. Nobody tells you this. You just wake up one day and the half-inch circles on your chest ache for no good reason. You don’t know it’s puberty, you just know that you probably have some rare form of cancer, and will probably require a nipple-ectomy, and will never be able to go to a swim party again. Then hair sprouts… or whatever (I’m not sure those videos they show you in health class cover nipple pain), and everything goes back to normal.

Pain is very often a precursor to change. God takes piles and piles of sawdust and builds a house somehow. That’s what I tell myself. I wrap myself in that fuzzy blanket every time I find myself on the cold craggy floor of rock bottom. It’s not untrue. My worst hurts have melted down my baser instincts and poured them into more just molds. But that’s not all that satisfying when you’re cracked and bleeding again on the bottom.

Jesus isn’t recorded as having any mental disruptions, but he and sorrow were on a first-name basis. It’s strange to have a God like that. One who didn’t just sit on his golden throne wondering why we were such whiners, but lost people he loved, was betrayed by friends, stressed to the point of sleepless nights, and tortured to death. That’s no mean thing. You know? For all the filth I sit in down here at the bottom, for all the things I don’t think I can explain to anyone else to make them understand, belief that I have to convince God this crud hurts isn’t a worry I have. Him, I can talk to… Most of the time.